Is it April 19th already? With tax filing time just days away most Americans and some sneaky Canadians are preparing their year's end "tax sheet" or "tax book" to hand in to the government. Every year millions of Americans must pay their year's end Main Tax to provide funding for all of the goods and services the government provides for them.

There are far too many uses for tax money to list here, but all government expenditures fall into one of a few categories. Look at this graph we made:

You're probably saying, "Well, crud, I only like 12% of the things my taxes are paying for! What a ripoff!" Maybe so, but government works by spending money on all sorts of things people want. The government knows it can't please everybody all the time, but it can please most people some of the time.

Even though you might hate a faith based initiative like Lutheran Beards for Children, there's a Lutheran out there whose baby needs a beard. And maybe they don't like it when they hear you're getting a government grant to shave dicks into goat hair for an art project.

Everybody gets a little bit and the government hopes that what you're getting is enough to offset all the stuff you hate. Or at least that's how the theory goes. These days all of your money is going to failed banks, failed wars, and old people who won't die because we invented a machine that keeps them alive as long as you constantly feed $20 bills into a slot on the side.

That's because America is a Failed Country. You can read more about that in our Guide to America's Collapse and Partition, due out in 2010. In the mean time, there are some things you can do to minimize the pain of paying your Main Tax every year.